


The Woods Remembered

by BrokenKestral



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, Having Faith, Memories, guarding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29920197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokenKestral/pseuds/BrokenKestral
Summary: "The woods have remembered you ever since the first time you got lost in them." Written for this prompt in the Adventures in Narnia challenge. The woods of Narnia remembered.
Kudos: 7





	1. The Trees Remembered

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: none of this is mine, but that shouldn’t surprise you by now, right?

_There are no Dryads within our trunks. For when the door opens, another world’s breeze brushes our branches, and the touch would cause a Dryad to shiver._

_We dig our roots deep. They burrow into the soil that remembers, for the earth always remembers, the feet that once tread it, the way the first touch held the soil from another world. The breeze is the touch of memory._

_We heard the whispers in our roots, and we did not fear that breeze. But we did not know what the soil did. Not till the day she walked past._

_Her hands were out, her eyes blind, as she pushed past our branches. The snow on them slid to the ground, and her hands touched our pine needles._

_The feel of her fingers. Fauns, Dryads, and Dwarfs can touch us with human-like fingers; a Centaur’s hand is theirs but twice the size. But it is not just the long twigs and round stump; it is the knowledge that here is one meant to be steward and ruler of our world. A touch we could not forget._

_She did not know where she was going. She walked out from our branches and into the glowing proof of other worlds, and there she met a Faun. We knew him too, his furtive steps and his grumbles. With no Dryads within us we had no way to warn her. So she left, and we remembered._

_She brought him back with her. Both their steps were furtive now, but his fell firmer. He brought her to the light and let her go on alone. She walked among us. She walked through._

_And she left._

_We mourned, and we remembered._

* * *

_She came again. Light and darkness had alternated several times, but that is little time to a tree. Many of us still remembered when ice had not been our permanent prison. She passed through us with swift feet. She was no longer lost. The breeze blew with her, and we trembled. Her love led her onward, her friendship, and we knew that she was no longer just of the other world._

_But she was followed. Two other hands grabbed our branches, pushing us aside. Two other feet followed where that Queen walked. And another voice split the silence._

_He was not met at the light._

_We kept our silence, watching. His hands promised a cruel rule, and his feet walked with sullen steps. His voice was no better._

_And_ **_she_ ** _found him. We barred her as often as we could, and never did we let her near the door to the other world, for we had been charged to hide it. It was not a difficult charge, for she seemed to dread the place where her feet first landed in this world; where she met the Lion. But she came near enough she found the second one. He went and sat beside her, his feet leaving the ground, sitting out from the shelter of our branches. He stayed long by the measurement of mortals; short by the time of a tree. Then the first came back and found him (_ **_she_ ** _was gone), and together they left again._

_It did not matter. They would come back._

_Till they did, we remembered._

* * *

_Four came. Four, feet on the ground, hands outstretched.. They spoke, as men do, and walked, and wandered._

_How light their feet. Not enough to break our prison of ice. Not enough to echo the feet of the King who once walked here with his horse. But enough the needles quivered, and each tree reached higher._

_They walked beneath us. We would always remember._

_They walked away. We were not their home. We were only their welcome, and keepers of memories._

* * *

_Soon enough our prison melted. We knew what it meant; the ground on every part of the world remembered the heavy Paws of its Maker. And we waited, waited for news. Dryads woke and whispered to their trees. Their trees held the whispers, passing them to us. Three of the four had walked to meet Him. The fourth had been rescued._

**_The Lion had been killed_ ** _. The Maker of the door, the forest, the needles and twigs and trunks, the One who made all life, died._

_We trembled, groaned, and wept in the way of trees. We remembered the ones who passed beneath us, and wondered. How had that promise proved false?_

_More news came with the light. The Lion rose. The magic binding traitor to death had broken. And later, later, far faster than a tree’s life, we heard that_ **_she_ ** _was dead._

_Time passed. The four, the ones we remembered, were crowned. We felt it—all the land feels it, when the rightful ones sit on the thrones._

_We rejoiced. We grew._

_And we, possibly only we, remembered._

_We remembered the Four had walked into Narnia below our branches. And we remembered that all things, in the end, are called home._

_So it was, years later, when our branches were far thicker, our trunks much higher, that a Stag dashed beneath us, and around the door. The door stayed shut. The door was not for him._

_A breeze touched our branches once again._

_Hoofbeats, beneath us. Our branches were too thick for horses. But then two feet—two more—four more—touched the ground._

_And we remembered._

_We bowed aside our branches, and the Kings and Queens came on. Their hands reached out, touching the branches as they walked through, and we felt their fingers shrink, the length diminishing back to a child’s. Their voices grew higher. And the breeze blew on them and made them its own._

_They walked through the door, and the door shut._

* * *

_One would think the story ended there._

_One would think we were simply to remember, remember next to a door that never opened again, not for them._

_One would be wrong._

_We remembered. We remembered, and we whispered our memory to every nut that fell to the ground. Every sapling that sprang up towards the sky grew from the memory in those whispers. Their steps, their hands on our branches, their breath and that breeze—the saplings knew them all._

_And the saplings whispered the memories to others. Dryads had a knowledge of the Kings and Queens no storyteller could explain, the length of their feet, the weight of their steps. The gentleness in their hands._

_The Dryads were forced back to sleep, when other feet came, when rude hands cut down many of the saplings. But a few survived. A few remembered._

_And those few were given a new charge. We had blocked the door. They were to hide the home where the Four once ruled._

_Thick and tall they grew, hiding from sight the land where the Four had walked. Our memory of the rulers whispered through that forest, a haunting knowledge every tree and twig knew. Soon the new Narnians avoided it. They could not hear our whispers, but they could feel the weight. The trees grew closer together, closer and closer, and with every rustle of leaves they whispered of our lost Kings and Queens._

_So when another door opened up, another breeze blew through, and four sets of feet hit the ground in an apple forest—we knew._

_We remembered._

_They were home._


	2. The Tree on the Other Side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BellatrixTheStar was kind enough to build a few ideas on chapter 15, where the trees on the Narnian side of the wardrobe remembered the Queen who walked through them. This epilogue is therefore not my idea nor my world, and written for my friend.

_ More trees remember than the ones in Narnian air. Long, long before they grew, before their seeds were sown, another tree was planted; another tree grew to fullness, each day remembering.  _

_ Sown from the apple seeds of the tree of protection, the tree in England held deep the memories of that other world.  _

“...  _ inside itself, in the very sap of it, the tree (so to speak) never forgot the other tree in Narnia to which it belonged. Sometimes it would move mysteriously when there was no wind blowing: I think that when this happened there were high winds in Narnia and the English tree quivered because, at that moment, the Narnian tree was rocking and swaying in a strong gale.”* _

_ The tree it came from was sown at Aslan’s command. The first tree was made to protect the land of Narnia, and the English tree always remembered. As a seed it had heard the deep and golden Voice; as it grew it remembered the voice, and the command. _

_ And it remembered the land from which it came. _

_ It felt, too, when the first tree fell. It felt when the protection ceased. _

_ It remembered the purpose for which the first tree was sown. It remembered the purpose grown in its very seed. _

_ And so, on a day of high winds and pouring rain, the English tree remembered, and loosened its roots. It allowed the wind to tear it from the ground, from the English soil it lived in, and it laid itself down to die. _

_ Even then, the tree remembered. Though it died, still the wood held the memories of another world. _

_ The Son of Adam, that once planted its seed in the ground, mourned its fall and made it into a wardrobe. _

_ The wood has been cut, polished, and shaped. There were no branches, no roots, no trunk. Yet still the wood remembered.  _

_ And when, at last, that wood felt the hands of one whose spirit belonged in Narnia, the wood called to the trees of the land it remembered, and the door within it opened.  _

_ A breeze blew from its open doors into that other world, and with it came the Narnian Queen, to walk beneath the Narnian wood. A gift, from the tree that remembered, to the wood that welcomed her.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The Magician’s Nephew


End file.
